The Moon in a Broken Cage
by burnmedown
Summary: Whatever needs to be said, it has to be said right now. Clay swallows around the ache in his throat and says hoarsely, "All call signs … Been an honor. Give 'em hell."
1. Chapter 1

This will be a multi-chapter story, but I'm not yet sure how many chapters. The rough setting is mid-season 2. It happens after the return from Mexico but diverges before the deployment to the Philippines. The latest episode was so devastating that I don't even know how to write about it, so here, have this instead.

And no, it is not a deathfic.

* * *

The girl whose picture Mandy puts up on the screen is named Ashli Mayers. She's 19 years old, blonde, and, in Sonny's estimation, irredeemably stupid.

The U.S. government made it abundantly clear that American citizens shouldn't be traveling to areas like the one where Ms. Mayers went to volunteer at a refugee camp made up mostly of war-orphaned children. She ignored that warning. Things turned out exactly the way literally anyone with common sense could have told her they would.

Sonny might be a little more understanding if she were a doctor or nurse, or, hell, even just a trained aid worker who could make a real difference, but she's not. She's just some idiot kid with no training who's now a hostage they're gonna have to risk their lives to rescue.

Clay is oddly quiet through the briefing. It's not exactly unheard of for the golden boy to disappear into his own head from time to time, so Sonny doesn't think much of it until they're sitting next to each other on the plane, he's complaining about Ashli-with-an-i and her stupid choices, and Clay suddenly turns to him and says, "Look, maybe she just wanted to make a difference."

It catches Sonny completely by surprise. His mouth moves, but no sound comes out.

"Maybe she wanted to make the world a little better place tomorrow than it was yesterday. Maybe she just wanted some kid to get to go to bed not hungry. To remember what a hug felt like." Clay's jaw clenches, like he's said more than he meant to. He looks down.

The pieces click together in Sonny's head.

Clay almost never talks about his grandparents, who they were or what they did, not even with the people he's closest to. It's easy to forget that he largely grew up in Africa … raised by missionaries who ran a home for orphans.

The few times Spenser has spoken briefly of his grandparents, the love and respect came through clear as day. Now, gnawing thoughtfully at a toothpick while trying to work out what to say next, Sonny wonders if Clay never talks about them because it makes it easier to pretend they're still over there somewhere, just waiting for their boy to drop by for a visit.

Clay sighs. "What she did was dumb. I get that. Clueless American with a savior complex going where she didn't belong and causing nothing but trouble. The way it turned out sucks for everybody, us included. But … she's also just a kid who wanted to do something good, and I'm sure she's paid enough for her mistakes by now. You know?"

"Yeah," Sonny drawls around his toothpick. "Reckon you're right. Ought to spend my energy bein' mad at the folks who really deserve it."

Privately, he ain't forgiven Ashli-with-an-i. He figures if she wanted to 'make a difference,' there were plenty of places in the world she could have done that _without _forcing other Americans to put their lives at risk trying to haul her dumb ass out of the fire.

Clay doesn't need to know that, though. Sonny keeps it to himself.

The village where Ms. Mayers is being held is thoroughly under the control of the extremist splinter group that snatched her from the refugee camp. The plan for getting her out, while viable, is risky and delicate enough to set Sonny's teeth on edge.

Mandy has reason to believe that the extremist group has gotten their hands on RPGs and possibly also SAMs, so the area is a strict no-fly zone. A helo will drop off Bravo and Alpha a safe distance away, out in the empty desert, where trucks will be waiting for them.

If shit hits the fan in the village, which it possibly might, the trucks will be their only way out, and they won't have air support to count on.

Most of the militants in the village belong to a single large extended family. Mandy and her people think they've identified a window during which many of the occupants, including the military-age males, will be gone to attend a cousin's wedding. Assuming Ms. Mayers doesn't get moved to a new location before then, Bravo and Alpha should have an opportunity to get her out with significantly less opposition.

The window isn't big, though. The teams are heading in during the middle of the night and should have until the following morning before everyone starts arriving back from the wedding. If all goes well, Bravo, Alpha, and the hapless Ms. Mayers will be long gone by then.

Sonny has been an operator long enough to know there's an entire _universe_ of shitty possibilities living inside that 'if.'

The first portion of the mission proceeds exactly as planned. They make it into and most of the way through the village without waking up the neighborhood. Ms. Mayers is being held annoyingly near the exact center of town, which probably isn't by accident.

Bravo and Alpha move through silent streets and eerie, cramped alleys, sticking to the areas where they're least likely to be noticed. Soon enough, they reach the squat stone building where the captive is hopefully still located.

After quietly, efficiently eliminating Ms. Mayers's guards, the teams proceed inside and find the girl exactly where Mandy said she would be.

"Bravo One to HAVOC. I pass Stanton," Jason reports.

Emaciated, hollow-eyed, drowning in an oversized dress and hijab, the captive looks like a child. The resentment Sonny has been harboring twists into something different, something that stabs at his lungs from the inside. He crouches at the girl's side and softens his drawl, telling her they're U.S. military, that she's gonna be okay.

She stares at him with a haunted wartime gaze and doesn't respond.

Trent kneels at her other side, his voice very gentle as he asks if she's injured, if she can stand.

"Get her up. We've gotta move," Jason says bluntly. They pull her to her feet. She flinches at the touch, but their American-accented voices, their English words telling her she's safe now, finally seem to be getting through. When Trent asks if she can walk, she nods jerkily.

They get shot at as soon as they step back out into the alley.

Despite the operators' best efforts, the village apparently now knows they're here.

Sonny shoves the girl behind him as other members of Bravo and Alpha return fire, eliminating the three hostiles. There will be more coming.

The exfil route through those narrow alleyways that were so quiet on the way in? Going back in feels like entering a kill box.

Apparently Jason agrees, because he elects to send his snipers high - Ray to the east, Spenser to the west - to provide overwatch for the portion of the exfil route that has the most labyrinthine alleys, the poorest visibility. Once the alleyways open up into broader roads toward the edge of town, Bravo Two and Six will rejoin the others, and they'll all finish hauling ass to the trucks.

They make it maybe halfway through the narrow alleys, taking out occasional hostiles with the help of Spenser and Perry, before the girl starts stumbling and lagging behind. Sonny hoists her up and tosses her over his shoulder, knowing it'll freak her out but not having any choice. Once they get her the hell out of here and she's safe, _then_ she can deal with whatever it is she's been through.

When they reach the designated rendezvous point, Spenser and Ray are nowhere in sight. Sonny's heart clenches with worry, but an instant later Ray comes skidding in from the east, tossing Jason a casual grin.

Seconds turn into minutes. Spenser doesn't show.

Sonny adjusts his grip on the trembling girl. _Come on, Golden Boy, where are you?_

Clay was still shooting, still covering them, no more than 10 minutes ago. What could have happened between then and now?

Jason starts to raise his hand to his radio, but Spenser beats him to it.

"_Bravo One, this is Bravo Six. We've got a problem, boss. You've got incoming. Maybe 25, 30, heavily armed. Including RPGs."_

For an instant, the members of Alpha and Bravo teams just stare at each other, because what the hell? Where did 30 heavily armed hostiles come from?

Then Jason keys his comms and says sharply, "Bravo Six, where the hell are you?"

There's a beat before Spenser answers. "_Still in the tower. I'll cover y'all for as long as I can, see if I can't take out those RPGs. You're gonna need it."_

"Get down here," Jason snaps. "Now. That's an order."

Another brief pause, then Clay says very calmly, "_Sorry, boss, not gonna happen. Fucked up my ankle. Can't run, but I can provide cover fire. Y'all need to get moving ASAP."_

Sonny starts to open his mouth. Before he can get the words out, Ray offers, "I'll get him, Jace."

Blackburn cuts in, voice grim. "_Afraid Bravo Six is right. Y'all're about to get overrun. If you don't proceed to exfil now, you're not gonna make it out. There's no time to go back."_

Jason clenches his jaw so tight it spasms.

"No," Sonny says. "NO."

Clay, his voice unsteady now, comes back on comms. "_All call signs … Been an honor. Give 'em hell."_

Sonny's pulse pounds in his throat. "Goddammit, kid," he begins, but Jason, shaking his head, grabs Sonny's arm and squeezes hard enough to hurt.

"Likewise, Bravo Six," Hayes says, allowing himself a single glance up toward the tower where their boy is alone and injured. Then he looks at the men around him and orders, "Move out."

Sonny has never in his life wanted more desperately to disobey an order, but he's a Navy SEAL, and there's a terrified girl trembling on his shoulder, and his job is to get her home alive.

Taking that first step away from Spenser rips Sonny's goddamn heart out. He takes it anyway, and then another and another.

He runs. Bullets spray the sandy dust near his feet, shatter walls at his back, but he runs and the hit doesn't come.

He runs and doesn't let himself feel anything. Not now. Not yet.

Spenser is as good as his word: he doesn't let the tangos get off a shot with the RPGs. That very well might be the only reason the teams make it to their exfil trucks without taking casualties.

They load up, ducking fire that pings off the metal and shatters windows. Sonny unceremoniously dumps the girl into a corner, barks at her to stay down, and turns to aim through the broken window. The truck lurches as Trent takes off. Sonny steadies himself, fires.

The tangos are just getting into a truck of their own. There will be pursuit. With the RPGs in play, that could be a problem.

Maybe sooner than anticipated: a tango with an RPG pops up in the bed of the truck, aims. Sonny yells a warning. Trent swerves, without knowing which direction he should be swerving.

At the last second, the tango's head snaps to the side and he falls forward. Sonny only just gets his eyes closed in time to avoid being blinded by the explosion that follows.

Sonny exchanges glances with Jason, and then they look back to where the truck that would have pursued them instead sits engulfed in flames.

"HAVOC, this is Bravo One," Jason reports breathlessly. "I pass Harper."

Sonny doesn't bother paying attention to HAVOC's response. He stares at the town receding into the distance. The remaining tangos are scrambling to get into vehicles that now have no real chance of catching up.

"Bravo Six?" Sonny says. "Clay?"

"_Yeah,"_ Spenser responds immediately. At the sound of his voice, Sonny's throat closes up with all the emotion he hadn't been letting himself feel.

"Look," he says, "I..."

"_I know."_ Clay clears his throat. "_I wish-"_

He cuts off. There's a burst of noise, so loud that Sonny flinches and reflexively grabs at his ear, and then nothing but silence.

A moment later, HAVOC reports that Clay's signal has gone dark.

Sonny closes his eyes, leans his head back, and wishes he couldn't feel a damn thing.

* * *

Up next: A chapter from Clay's point of view.


	2. Chapter 2

Clay likes going high, being on overwatch. There's something reassuring and satisfying about being able to see trouble coming and eliminate it before it ever has the chance to threaten his brothers.

He stays up in the tower, determined to cover Bravo and Alpha for as long as possible before heading down to meet them so they can all get the hell out of this godforsaken town and send Ashli Mayers back home to her family.

When the time comes to go, Clay does a quick check to make sure all is clear and he isn't going to run into any surprises on the way to the bottom of the tower. Then he starts down the stairs, moving at a fast, controlled clip.

The surprise, when it comes, isn't anything he anticipated. He was looking for tangos; was concerned about meeting up with bullets or explosives. A stair that had crumbled off on one side? He never thought to worry about that.

He's moving from the second step down to the third when his foot drops straight down through empty space, finally landing hard on the fourth step with a crunch that spikes through his ankle. Only a frantic grab at the railing keeps him from taking a header all the way down, which would have been painful and possibly fatal.

Clay is clinging to the railing, panting through the pain in his ankle, when he glances up and spots the trouble coming.

Here near the top of the stairs, he's still high up enough to see most of the town and the desert beyond. To the east, where a squat line of hills poke up from the desolate sand and stone, there's movement, a lot of movement, where there shouldn't be any at all.

Gritting his teeth and using the railing for support, Clay manages to hop back up the stairs to the top, where he settles at the edge of the balcony, resting his HK416 on the low railing and peering through the scope. What he sees freezes his pulse for an instant.

There are probably 30 tangos, they've got RPGs, and they're going to reach Bravo and Alpha before his boys can get to the exfil trucks.

In a matter of seconds, the pieces slot into place in Clay's mind.

His ankle, already swelling in his boot. The unexpected opposition that's about to blindside his brothers. The fact that he's the only one in position to do something about it.

His heart stutters, pounds like a weight in his chest. He takes a few deep breaths and reaches for his radio.

Maybe it was always going to end like this. Maybe it's not the worst way to go out.

(It's just that he doesn't want to go out. Not yet. He has things left to do.)

A broken step. A goddamn broken step.

He's a tier one operator. He's made it through missions no one had any right surviving. He's dodged bullets and RPGs, and he walked away from a helicopter crash ready to kick ass, and now he's going to die because there was a broken step and because, just for an instant, he wasn't paying attention.

"_Them the breaks,"_ Sonny's imagined voice says wryly in his mind.

Jason doesn't like it, of course, and tries to order him to come down. Clay expected that. When he tells his team leader about the ankle, though, Hayes does the same mental math Clay did, then comes to the same conclusion. Clay was expecting that, too. You don't get to the position of being able to lead a tier one team unless you're a realist.

The trouble is inbound and moving fast. In a few seconds, shit is going to hit the fan and there won't be time for talking. Whatever needs to be said, it has to be said right now.

Clay swallows around the ache in his throat and says hoarsely, "All call signs … Been an honor. Give 'em hell."

Sonny snarls, "Goddammit, kid," but then immediately cuts off, which is probably Jason's doing.

They don't have time for arguing about this. Clay trusts that Jason understands that.

"Likewise, Bravo Six," Hayes responds, calm and steady. Someone who didn't know him so well probably wouldn't even pick up the hint of emotion in his voice.

Then the tangos are on them, and there's no time for anything but trying to keep his boys alive.

Clay prioritizes the RPGs, trusting Bravo and Alpha to handle the rest. For every tango he drops, another pops up. He keeps shooting, only iron will and years of training keeping his hands steady when he reloads, preventing the adrenaline from taking over.

This is it. Swan song. It has to mean something. He has to make it count.

The tangos will figure out where he is. They might already be on their way. Clay can't take the time to be checking the stairs behind him; he just has to hope that, by the time they make it here, he will have finished doing what needs to be done.

Bravo and Alpha reach the trucks, apparently without taking casualties, and load up. Clay watches them head out, caught between relief and a sort of gut-deep terror that makes him grit his teeth to stop himself from begging, _Come back. Please don't leave me._

He starts hearing voices behind him, the faint scuffle of footsteps at the bottom of the stairs, right at the same time that he spots the tango taking aim at his boys with an RPG.

_Oh, no you don't._ Clay sights in. Slow inhale, slow exhale. Last shot he'll ever take.

His aim is true. The tango goes down. Blows up his own damn truck instead of his target.

Clay wants to laugh in triumph, because Bravo and Alpha will make it out now, and a family will get their daughter back. He also wants to cry. There's not much time for doing either. He draws his Glock, faces the stairs, and waits. No one visible yet, but he can hear them; can make out the faint shape of their voices as they discuss how best to take him down.

"_Bravo Six? Clay?"_ Sonny's soft drawl in his ear is so unexpected that Clay flinches. Then his eyes prickle with tears, because _Jesus_ he's going to miss Sonny. He's going to miss all of them so much. They're his family, a family that he didn't get to have for near long enough.

"Yeah," he says. Can't come up with anything else. Any way to put this into words.

"_Look, I-"_ Sonny cuts off. The grief in his voice lands like a punch to the stomach.

"I know," Clay says. He does. It doesn't have to be said. "I wish-" What does he wish for? To not die right now? To just not have to be alone when he does?

Before he has a chance to figure out how he wants to finish that sentence, something clinks at the top of the stairs, spins toward him.

Grenade.

Clay has just enough time to think _Like Adam_ before the world explodes into noise and fractured light.

He comes back to himself facedown, blinded, ears ringing. _Flashbang,_ he realizes, and scrambles blindly for his Glock; not sure where he'll point it, whether at them or-

A boot grinds his wrist down. He looks up through tears and through the afterimage of light to see a gun butt headed for his face.

Then there's nothing at all.


	3. Chapter 3

The awful finality of Spenser's silence is still ringing in their ears when Ray says sharply, "Where's this blood from?"

For an instant Sonny is thrown into the past; he blinks once and sees Nate, dead, eyes wide open. Blinks again, finds his way back to the present, and starts checking his brothers over for injuries. Everyone is conscious, talking. They all look fine.

Then Ray swears and lunges forward to drop to his knees beside Ashli Mayers, who lies still and silent, eyes closed, right where Sonny dropped her.

"_Shit!_ Sonny, put pressure here!"

Automatically, Sonny moves to comply, pressing down hard on the girl's side. She doesn't react. Blood squishes up between Sonny's fingers, and he's suddenly, inexpressibly furious, because they _lost Clay_ and it can't just be for nothing.

It has to have meant something. It has to.

"You don't get to die," he tells the girl. "You hear me? Breathe, goddammit."

They're supposed to take her dumb ass home, where she can recover and live a life and never give more than a passing thought to the men who risked everything to save her. She's not allowed to just check out five minutes after they rescued her.

Not when Sonny was the one who was carrying her, and he somehow didn't even know she was hit.

Not when Clay _died_ for her.

It's the first time he's let himself face that word, and the resulting grief rips into Sonny's chest like it's got claws. He coughs away a sob that tries to break loose, forces himself to focus on breathing, on keeping all the girl's blood from leaking out onto the dingy metal.

Ray reports that she's alive, still breathing, pulse a little weak but steady. Sonny wishes that Trent were back here, but Bravo Four is a little busy driving at the moment. They'll get him to take a look at the girl as soon as they reach the helo.

Please just let her make it till then.

With Ray monitoring her pulse and breathing, Ms. Mayers hangs on until they reach the exfil helo, at which point Trent takes over. He checks the wound, says it looks to be just a deep gash. Figures the blood loss is only hitting her so hard because she was already dehydrated and half-starved. Seeing Sonny's expression, Trent tries to reassure him that she'll likely be fine with rest, fluids, and maybe a blood transfusion; even so, Sonny spends the entire flight feeling like his lungs are trying to crawl out through his ribs.

He was _carrying her._ How did he not know?

It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Any of it. Not the bullet hole in the girl's side, and sure as hell not the fact that they left their brother behind to die alone.

Once they reach the nearest military base, the girl is whisked off by a medical team, and Bravo is provided quarters to stay in. Sonny figures it might be a good thing that they're in a place they never shared with Clay. Right now he's not sure he could handle seeing the kid's stuff scattered all over the place.

The bad thing, though, is that there's suddenly nothing for Sonny to do with himself. He was running and dodging bullets, and then he was trying to keep the girl alive, and now there's just … nothing. Nothing to keep him from crawling inside his own head and getting lost there.

It doesn't take long for all of Bravo, or what's left of Bravo, to migrate together and sit in a sort of shell-shocked silence. Ray rests his chin on steepled hands and looks at the ceiling, possibly having a silent argument with God. Jason bounces his knee while his hands twist a rubber band over and over until it breaks. Sonny gnaws on a toothpick. Brock, wearing a thousand-yard stare, brushes Cerberus without ever once looking down. Trent keeps getting up and going back to wash his hands again, even though they all know there's no more blood left under his fingernails.

Eventually Mandy shows up. She keeps her chin up, gaze direct, but that doesn't prevent her from looking like a woman going to her own execution when she faces them.

Sonny bolts up, starts to open his mouth, but Jason beats him to it. "You want to tell us what the _fuck_ happened out there?" His voice is tight with fury.

Mandy shakes her head. "I don't know. I don't … I don't understand what we missed."

"You missed 30 heavily armed tangos is what you missed, and we paid the price for it."

She nods, still meeting his gaze. "I know. I'm sorry, Jason. I am."

"Yeah? Well, tell that to Clay." Hayes turns away, flings the broken rubber band violently enough to make Mandy flinch, even though it wasn't aimed at her.

"We'll find him," she says, voice wavering; then she catches herself, apparently remembering not to make promises she can't keep, and revises the statement to, "We'll do everything we can to find him."

"Yeah? How soon you reckon that'll be?" Sonny's voice comes out hoarse, like he's been yelling for hours, even though he hasn't said a word in what feels like forever. "Before or after those shitstains get around to releasing a video where … where they're-"

"Sonny," Ray says, quiet but sharp. When Sonny looks at him, Ray shakes his head, just once, and all the strength goes out of Sonny's legs. He sits down suddenly and clenches his jaw tightly shut, because if he doesn't he might embarrass himself.

He can't even figure out what he's supposed to hope for: that Clay is still alive, because then there's a chance they could find him and bring him home; or that Clay is already dead, because then at least those bastards can't take him apart on camera and broadcast his suffering to the whole damn world.

Mandy has gone even paler, if that's possible. When Sonny looks back up, she meets his gaze, seems to be trying to come up with something to say, but finally just shakes her head a little and looks at the wall behind him. "Ashli Mayers is going to be okay," she says in a monotone. "I thought you all might like to know that."

Without waiting for a response, she turns and leaves.

She isn't lying about trying to find Clay; she pulls her team together, and they stay up all night scouring ISR data and satellite photos, trying to figure out if Spenser (or Spenser's body) has been moved, and if so, to where.

What they know for sure is that multiple vehicles left the village in the hours following the rescue of Ms. Mayers. Unfortunately, there's no real way to determine which if any of them might have been transporting Clay, and even if there were, the trucks are virtually impossible to track using the sparse data that's available.

Ultimately, Mandy says that attempting to find Clay based on satellite images would be a bit like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle the size of Colorado. Bottom line: it's not gonna happen. She's leaning hard on her assets in country, but so far, nothing.

Then and for four days afterward, nothing.

Mandy's people don't pick up any relevant chatter. No horrifying videos of Spenser's brutal murder, or pictures of his mutilated corpse, pop up on the dark web. There's just silence, and a Clay-shaped absence in their world that none of them can stop thinking about.

On the fifth day, one of Mandy's assets relays a rumor: a group that's supposedly tangentially affiliated with the one that took Ms. Mayers is reported to be holding a prisoner in a remote location roughly a day's drive from Clay's last known location.

Mandy doesn't much like it. She can't verify the rumor, and it's coming from a single source she doesn't consider overly reliable. She and Blackburn confer at length; she and Jason argue.

In the end, after going around in circles for long enough that Sonny wants to chew his own damn fingers off, they're finally given the green light to go after their boy.

Mandy watches them go, hands wrapped around her elbows, eyes shadowed with worry. She made Jason promise twice that he'd watch himself, that he'd stay alert for any indications, no matter how subtle, that his team is being drawn into a trap.

Truth is, Sonny isn't even much worried about whether it is or not.

If Clay is there, dead or alive, they'll bring him home. If Clay isn't there? Well, at least maybe they'll finally get a chance to hand out some vengeance. _Anything_ is better than being forced to sit with their thumbs up their asses.

He hangs onto that opinion, doggedly, right up until they reach their target location and all hell breaks loose.


	4. Chapter 4

Content warning: It's mostly not graphic and largely only discussed in terms of its aftermath, but this chapter does contain torture. Clay's new friends don't like him.

* * *

Clay comes back to consciousness lying on his back on a cold stone floor. He stares at the ceiling for a while before his scattered thoughts coalesce enough for him to actually register that he's awake.

His head hurts. To be more precise, it feels like his brain has had enough of this shit and is attempting to exfil through his left eye and temple. Judging by that, the dried blood making his face itch, and the lurking nausea telling him he'll puke if he tries to move, he's got a concussion.

Maybe a bad one, because the last thing he remembers is getting captured just before dawn, and now it's night again. The room is dark, which Clay's headache appreciates, but he can see stars, desert-brilliant, blazing through a crumbled hole in the roof overhead.

After a while, he puts together the rest of the pieces - dry mouth, shaking hands, molasses-slow thinking - and realizes most of the lost time probably wasn't due to the head injury. He's been drugged, presumably so he could be moved somewhere away from the village.

He takes stock of himself. He's been stripped to his boxers and T-shirt. His hands are bound in front of him, but his feet are free. The relentless throb of his swollen ankle tells him why they probably aren't much worried about him trying to run anywhere at the moment.

Clay shivers, desperately thirsty, too disoriented to even try to figure out if they've left him any water. He drifts, opens his eyes again to find moonlight streaming through the jagged-edged opening overhead. The moon is almost full; there's just an edge of it missing, like a page someone has folded over to mark their place in a book.

He stares at the moon and imagines that it's in a cage and he's the one who's free, but it moves on and leaves him behind, sliding beyond his sight. Clay looks at the stars, and wonders how long it will take before someone comes to drag him out of this room, and shakes with the force of how desperately he wishes his team would find him before that happens.

He pictures them: Sonny, wearing an open, relieved smile, teasing him about the stench of sour sweat and blood. Trent, confidently wrapping his ankle and checking his eyes and telling him he'll be fine. Brock, holding an eager Cerberus back from licking his face. Ray, patting his shoulder, calling him _brother._ Jason looking straight into his soul: _You good, Bravo Six?_

But they don't come, and eventually Clay falls asleep, or maybe passes out. When he next opens his eyes, the sky is pale with dawn and two men are none too gently pulling him to his feet. He throws up on their shoes, which earns him a gut punch, which makes him throw up again, so it's really just a good time all around.

They drag him out the door and up a dank stairwell, obviously annoyed that they're forced to support most of his weight so he doesn't faceplant into the floor. He ends up in a wide, open room with a bunch of windows. There are a lot of unfriendly faces waiting there, but there's also a breeze that smells of sand and morning, so he closes his eyes and breathes until an open-handed slap forces him back to reality.

They ask questions, wanting to know who he is; how many men were with him; how they found out where Ashli Mayers was being held. Clay initially just doesn't say anything at all. That receives the expected response. He eventually spits blood, takes deep breaths until the urge to vomit passes, and then tells them patiently in English that he doesn't understand what they're saying.

That buys him a brief respite as they confer, then send for someone, an elder uncle who speaks better English. Left bound in a corner, Clay tries and fails to blink away the double vision while idly listening as his captors debate whether he's lying about not being able to understand them.

The new interrogator arrives and repeats the questions in heavily accented English, at which point Clay very politely explains in French that he doesn't speak any English.

He almost grins at the look on their faces. What's even the point of getting captured and tortured to death if you don't manage to have a little fun along the way?

Later, after they drag him back to his cell, he regains consciousness with an even worse headache. He lies on the floor, cradles his newly broken fingers to his chest, and gazes up at the brass blue of the midday sky showing through the hole in the roof.

How long has he been here? Between the drugs and the concussion, he isn't sure how much time he's lost. Has it been long enough for Ashli Mayers to make it back home?

He decides to believe it has, and that her mother will be hugging her right now. She'll be settling into her childhood bedroom, a place where she's always felt safe and one day will again.

Her sister will be braiding her hair. She'll be starting to remember what it feels like to be touched by someone who isn't trying to hurt her.

She's safe now. It's okay, because she's safe.

As the day stretches on, Clay's room heats up like a furnace. His lips crack and his mouth turns into a desert. He finds that they've left him a bowl of water that even seems more or less fresh, but he's careful with it because he doesn't know when they'll give him more.

He lies on the filthy floor in a pool of sweat, closes his eyes, and goes to the beach to hang out with Brian.

Time passes in fits and starts. He closes his eyes and it's night; opens them and it's day. They ask him questions. He answers in French, if at all, and later comes back to find himself shaking on the floor, teeth clenched so tight that his jaw spasms.

The thing about the whole village being related is that it means the men holding him now are the brothers or cousins or uncles of the ones he shot so that Bravo and Alpha could get out alive, could take Ashli Mayers home.

(Sometimes his captors don't even ask him any questions at all.)

Eventually, Clay starts just going away as soon as they drag him out of the room so that they can hurt him.

He gets very good at that, to the point that he sometimes wakes up back in his room without any clue how long it's been since they hauled him there. He then has to try to piece together whatever it was they did to him based on the evidence it left on his body, which is pretty disconcerting, but, he figures, better than the alternative.

Denial might not be healthy, but that doesn't mean it isn't sometimes useful.

There are a lot of beatings. His concussion lingers, maybe worsens. He bruises. His ribs break, and he's pretty sure his left arm does too. Sometimes there's water in his lungs and he coughs for hours. At some point, the knives come out; he wakes with half a dozen shallow, bleeding gashes.

None of the damage is fatal. It's clear that his captors aren't ready to kill him just yet, which means they must have something planned, which is … worrying.

It occurs to him more than once that he could decide to just not come back. Just go to the beach and stay there. If he remains catatonic long enough, eventually they might just get tired of it and dispose of him.

He considers it, but decides he isn't ready to give up yet, so he tries to pay attention during the times when they're not hurting him badly enough that he has to disappear.

He watches the guards. There's one that's younger than the others, mid-teens maybe, short and quiet with big eyes. They send him to Clay's cell with water, with scraps of food; as their prisoner's condition worsens, sometimes they even leave the kid alone on watch. Clay can't understand it. Don't they know what they've captured? What they're risking by leaving a child on guard with no backup? How can they value their kid so little?

Clay looks at the boy and sees an opportunity, a way to maybe not die, and the fact that he hates himself a little for that doesn't mean he won't take the chance if it comes.

As other injuries pile up, as he weakens from the relentless heat and the lack of food, his sprained ankle begins to heal. That's another mistake Clay's captors shouldn't be making. He has some broken toes courtesy of a hulking guard that really, really doesn't like him, but he isn't crippled.

They should have crippled him.

He hopes like hell that they're gonna end up being sorry they didn't.


	5. Chapter 5

Content warning for this chapter: Accidental, nonfatal injury to a child.

* * *

"You're gonna be just fine, little buddy," Sonny tells the kid. "Stay with me, okay?"

The little boy doesn't answer, doesn't react as Sonny switches out the saturated bandage for another. The kid cried at first, but now he just looks tired and listless, blinking slowly at the ceiling with big, long-lashed, Jersey-cow eyes. He's maybe seven years old. Too damn little to be dealing with this shit.

The good thing is that Trent says the boy will be fine as long as they can keep the blood loss under control until he can get stitches and antibiotics. The bad thing, of course, is that the kid's got a goddamn bullet hole in his leg.

Turned out Mandy's source wasn't trying to lead Bravo into an ambush; it was just plain, run-of-the-mill bad intel. The building where a prisoner was supposedly being held turned out to be nothing more than a multi-family home full of frightened kids and their mostly frightened mothers - plus one particularly outspoken lady who didn't much care for the idea of a bunch of burly foreign men with weapons entering her home, and who didn't seem all that intimidated by said weapons.

Clay isn't here. According to Cerberus's nose, which Sonny trusts with his life, he never was.

They're right back where they started, except for the part where they're now responsible for getting a bunch of civilians caught in a crossfire.

It's not entirely their fault. Bravo finished searching the building, confirmed their boy wasn't there, and tried to head out and leave the families in peace; perhaps a bit shaken, but none the worse for wear.

Unfortunately, a neighbor who'd seen them enter didn't much care for the U.S. military and went to get backup to help him express that sentiment. The shooting started as soon as Bravo tried to exit the house.

Considering the amount of bullets flying and the number of civilians present, they're honestly probably lucky the boy was the only casualty. Not that that's much comfort to him. Poor little guy.

There wasn't much more Trent could do for the kid that couldn't be handled by someone else, so he went with Ray to the top floor to try to get an angle on the shooters that are preventing Bravo from getting the hell out of here. That left Sonny to take care of the little boy, which makes the second time in less than a week that he's been responsible for trying to keep a kid from bleeding out.

When Sonny told himself that anything was better than sitting on their asses, he really wasn't thinking about children getting caught in crossfire. _Pointless_ crossfire, which makes it even worse.

A noise behind him has Sonny instinctively turning, shifting so he can get a blood-covered hand to his Glock. He relaxes when he sees that it's just the hollering woman from earlier. She might be pissed off (probably rightfully so), but he doesn't think she's an actual threat.

She sweeps a withering gaze over Sonny, then looks beyond him and catches sight of the child on the floor.

Sonny may not have any kids of his own, but he _does_ have a mama, and he knows that expression.

While still maintaining pressure on the kid's wound, Sonny shifts to the side so the woman can drop to her knees beside her son. She cradles the boy's face in her hands, talking to him soft and singsong. The child focuses on her, blinks, smiles a little.

Sonny wishes he spoke the local dialect so he could tell her that he's sorry, that her boy will be okay, that she just needs to stem the bleeding and get him to a doctor for stitches. Automatically, Sonny looks around for Clay so he can ask him to translate, and then immediately gets punched in the gut by the fact that there is no Clay anymore; not here, and not anywhere else they can figure.

When the woman is done talking to her son and gently smoothing her fingers through his hair, she turns her attention, and voice, back to Sonny. He winces and leans as far back as he can without letting the kid start bleeding again.

Some things transcend language. He's definitely picking up the gist of her opinion on him.

Tirade finished, the woman gives Sonny a hard push to the chest, which he wasn't expecting. He falls back, turning loose of the kid. Before he can get himself back up, the woman's slender hands have already replaced his, pressing down firmly on the wound. The new bandages aren't soaked through yet, so the bleeding must be slowing.

"You'll, uh, need to get him to a doctor," Sonny says. The woman looks at him and says something that he would imagine concerns his parentage and character, and probably also what he can go do with a camel.

Sonny is headed to the top floor to check on his team when he realizes that the shooting has stopped. Hopefully that means they're all fixing to be able to get out of here.

Halfway up the stairs, Sonny nearly trips over Brock, who is sitting leaned against the wall with his dog in his lap.

Brock says in a distant voice, "I think … I think Cerb got shot."

No. _No, _goddammit.

The dog looks alert, bright-eyed and panting, but the fur at his neck is matted with blood. Sonny takes off the dog's vest, runs his hands along Cerberus's sides, head, neck. Nothing. The dog doesn't whimper. There doesn't seem to be any clear source for the blood.

That's when Sonny realizes that Brock is just sitting there, not helping him check the dog, and the relief he'd been starting to feel plummets straight into dread.

"Shit," he says. "Brock. Hey, look at me. Are you hit? Is that your blood?"

Brock blinks at him in confusion, furrowing his eyebrows. "No," he says, then looks down at the blood running down his arm, streaming from his fingertips onto Cerberus's fur. "Oh."

"Goddammit." Sonny keys his radio. "Bravo One, we good for exfil? Bravo Five is hit. Need to get him out of here."

"_Coming to you,"_ Hayes responds shortly.

Within a couple minutes, the rest of the team turns up on the stairs, reporting that half the tangos are dead or down and the rest have taken off. Trent goes a little pale when he sees the amount of blood Brock has lost, but declares him okay to move once his upper arm is bandaged.

Ears still ringing from the firefight, Sonny helps a wobbly, confused Brock to the helo. They're almost there when Brock's knees give out and he nearly faceplants into the sandy dirt. Together, Trent and Sonny manage to get him inside and lay him down flat, legs propped up. Cerberus curls up next to him.

No one tries to talk on the flight. Trent tends to Brock, monitoring his vitals, making sure the blood loss is under control. Everyone else just sits and listens to the helicopter's steady thrum.

A medical team meets them at the base. To make sure the medics will be able to treat their patient without getting their arms bitten off, Ray coaxes Cerberus away from Brock's side, at which point Brock's eyes pop open and he starts trying to sit up.

"Stay still," Sonny orders him.

"It's just my arm," Brock mumbles, like a goddamn idiot.

"There are _arteries_ in your arm, you goddamn idiot," Sonny tells him, but Brock isn't paying attention because he's too busy trying to sit up so he can see where his dog has gone.

"Stay down, dammit! The dog is fine! You ain't!"

At that point the medical team swarms the helo, and Sonny steps back and lets the stubborn hair missile handler become their problem.

Inside the base, Mandy is waiting to see Bravo arrive. If she's got half a brain cell - which she ought to, being a good idea fairy and all - she won't say, insinuate, or think anything close to _I told you so._ Sonny never has gotten around to yelling at her about what happened in the village where they lost Spenser, but he figures he will sooner or later, and today seems as good a day as any.

But she doesn't say a word. She just watches, looking hollow-eyed and sad, as they pass.

Sonny goes to stand in the shower and try not to think about the fact that Clay has been missing for five days now. Even if they had gotten him back today, they might not have been able to bring home the same guy they lost.

But it's a moot point, because they didn't. They didn't get him back. Not any version of him.

For another three days, Mandy and her people search and find nothing. Bravo Team clings to sanity by rallying around Brock, who bounces back surprisingly quickly after receiving a blood transfusion and sleeping for 14 hours straight. Sonny is pretty sure they're smothering him, but he must know they need it, because he doesn't complain.

Just after dawn on the eighth day after they lost Clay, Blackburn throws open the door to Bravo's quarters. Like the rest of them, he's been aimless and subdued for days, but now he's a bundle of tightly controlled energy.

"Gear up," he says. "Spenser's alive. And we know exactly where he is."


	6. Chapter 6

Content warning: Yep, torture.

* * *

After he's been in captivity for probably somewhere around a week, Clay finally figures out what it is they're waiting for.

His captors have apparently concluded that he really doesn't speak their dialect, because they've stopped bothering to make sure he can't overhear important conversations. It's not even close to the only area in which they've grown complacent. Hell, they're not even binding his hands most of the time.

Lying in his room with his ear pressed to the crack at the bottom of the door, Clay listens as one of his guards, who also doubles as the closest thing this motley crew has to a leader, tries to arrange a meet with ISIL to sell one elite American military operator in good condition.

_Good condition._ Clay tamps down the hysterical laugh that tries to escape.

At least now he knows why he's not missing any important bits. These assholes think they'll get more money for him if he's not too badly damaged.

He also knows that his life, whatever's left of it, is about to be over.

The idiots holding him now? They're not well funded, not well trained. Basically just a single extended family of dumb extremist assholes who hit the jackpot. The mistakes these guys are making aren't mistakes ISIL is going to make.

The exchange is set to happen in three days. Once he changes hands, it will be over. All except for the part where he gets to star in his very own snuff film, and the people he loves get to live the rest of their lives with those images burned into their minds.

If he wants that to not happen, he has to either escape or die trying.

Clay needs two things: he needs a weapon, and he needs a way to break out of the room where they're keeping him. Unfortunately, the door is both deadbolted and padlocked from the outside, so he'll have to make his move once they open it. Which is where the weapon comes in.

He has to get his hands on a knife. His best chance of doing so is probably going to come when they're using them on him. This means, unfortunately, that the next time they come for him, he's going to have to stay present for whatever happens next.

His luck being what it is, the next time doesn't involve knives, or anything else that might make a useful weapon. His captors have decided that there's a pressing Clay-having-fingernails issue that urgently needs to be solved. Clay thinks this is incredibly cliché and tells them so in French, which earns him a free punch to the broken ribs. The resulting violent coughing hurts so all-encompassingly that he falls out of his head for a while, despite trying to stay.

He ends up back on the floor of his room, bleeding from both hands, miserable and feverish and no nearer escape than he was yesterday.

The bastard brigade leaves him alone for the rest of the day. He isn't sure whether to be grateful, because he is definitely starting to fray around the edges and isn't sure how much more of this he can take, or disappointed, because he needs a way to escape and is rapidly running out of time to do so.

Toward late afternoon, his cough deepens, starts bringing up thick phlegm that tastes like rotting fish. His chest seems to be full of razor blades. He shivers, cold to the bone even though he can still feel the heat of the room on his skin.

The teenager comes to bring food in the early evening. When he sees the state of the prisoner, his eyes widen and he reaches out to brush his fingertips against Clay's forehead. With a sharp indrawn breath, the kid races off to get the others.

They figure out pretty quickly that they've fucked up. Their 'American military operator in good condition' is suddenly looking like an American military operator who might not live three more days - and while his corpse is still worth something, it's not worth nearly as much as he is alive.

After some frantic discussion, they send for a doctor, or at least someone they refer to as such. By the time the man arrives, it's nearly dark. Clay feels like he's floating somewhere up near the ceiling, watching his body from a distance. He's cold and hot and his bones hurt.

The doctor talks, his voice flickering in and out of Clay's consciousness. He says something about pneumonia. He gives some injections, lifts Clay's head to force water into his mouth.

After a while, mercifully, they all leave and Clay passes out.

When he wakes, it's late and the moon is in its cage over his head again. He stares at it for a while. The left side of his chest still hurts like there's a knife in his lung, but his temperature is down and he's a bit more clear-headed.

He decides that Ashli Mayers maybe feels well enough by now for her first real outing, so she'll be out getting a pedicure.

Stella didn't even like pedicures all that much, but she would do them as girl bonding rituals with other women she cared about, so Clay figures Ashli will with her mom and sisters, or maybe with some of her friends from school.

She'll be getting little patterns painted on her toes, flowers or hearts or whatever the hell it is that teenage girls like. Maybe she's still jumping at every loud noise, but she's home and she's safe and that matters. It _matters._

Clay closes his eyes, tries to take a deep breath, and falls into a fit of coughing that makes his ribs stab him from the inside. He dreams that his grandfather leans over him, touches his cheek with a gentle, arthritis-gnarled hand, and tells him, "You know, son, I sure am proud of you."

When Clay opens his eyes again, his face is wet and he's alone.

The next day is the least terrible one he's had since he's been here. His captors are now wary of killing him, so they leave him alone except to inject him with antibiotics, give him water and broth and some kind of pills that he swallows on the off chance they might be helping.

By evening, he's regained enough strength to stand. His chest still hurts and he's shaky, but he paces back and forth in his room and doesn't even fall over. He's not exactly going to be breaking any of Jason's speed records anytime soon, but it's gonna have to be good enough.

He sleeps restlessly through the night. Sometime before dawn, he is awakened by a cigarette being put out on his neck.

_Well, good morning to you too, Fuckface._

Clay pries open crusty eyelashes, coughs wetly, and stares listlessly up at the big guard who hates him a little extra. The fucker grins, displaying an appalling lack of oral hygiene, and draws a wicked-looking blade.

It's been days since Clay bothered with trying to fight back or even reacting much, which is probably why the guard looks so surprised when his prisoner kills him with his own knife.

Adrenaline lends Clay just enough strength to catch the body as it falls forward and ease it to the floor. The guard gurgles quietly through his cut throat, then goes silent.

Mercifully, the big asshole left the door unlocked behind him. Gripping the knife, Clay limps over, eases the door farther open, and peers out into the corridor that leads to the stairs.

The kid is on watch. Clay both hoped for and dreaded that.

With Clay as weak as he is, the safest thing to do is to cut the kid's throat. Make sure it ends as quick and quiet as possible, because if the teenager yells for help, it's all over.

It's the only thing that makes sense. Clay doesn't do it.

He may be weak, but he's still a hell of a lot bigger than the teenager. He can use that.

Dumb kid isn't even paying attention, just staring up at the ceiling, probably thinking about a girl or wishing he could sleep in. By the time he realizes he's in trouble, Clay's good arm is locked tight around his neck and he can't make a sound.

Clay throws them both back against the wall, using his weight to pull the kid down where he can get a leg around him and keep him from fighting loose. He waits long enough to be absolutely sure the kid is out, then lets go and staggers to his feet.

The boy is breathing and hopefully doesn't have brain damage. It's the best Clay can do for him.

This early, the building is dimly lit and echoing silent. Clay encounters one more guard at the top of the stairs, using the knife on him without reservation. The man is about his size, so Clay takes his clothing. It won't fool anyone who gets a close-up glance, but it might just buy him enough time to cross the space between the compound and the steep, desolate hills he hopes to disappear into.

Shaking with exertion, Clay finishes wrapping the turban to hide his blond hair and beard. He straightens his shoulders, pushes off the wall he's been leaning against, and walks out the open door. Everything hurts. He doesn't let himself limp.

There's only the faintest hint of pale gray light to the east, just enough that he can vaguely gauge the distance to the first outcrop that marks the edge of the jagged, rocky hills.

It's the longest walk of Clay's life. With the gentle, windswept silence of the early desert morning filling his ears, he waits for the shout, for the shot, for everything to end.

It doesn't. He slides into concealment behind the shelf of stone, takes deep, wheezing breaths that painfully shift his ribs, and then staggers on, deeper into the broken landscape.

When Clay has put enough distance between himself and the compound to feel minutely safer, and when he starts shaking too hard to go any farther without resting, he drops down against a slab of rock, pulls out the sat phone he took off the third guard, and lets out a breath when he sees that it's got a signal.

Time to call in the cavalry.


	7. Chapter 7

Content warning for this chapter: Brief speculative mention of threats of disturbing violence against a child (no such thing actually happens).

* * *

Spenser called for help.

That thought keeps rattling around inside Sonny's head. He's spent the past week barely daring to hope that their kid might still be breathing. Clay being in good enough shape to rescue his own ass and figure out a way to let his team know where he is? It seems too damn good to be true.

Apparently Mandy thinks the same thing, because after Bravo has geared up and received a quick briefing on the terrain and situation they're headed into, she turns to Jason, takes a deep breath, and says, "We have to consider the possibility that this is a trap."

For a moment, no one responds. Then Sonny says, very pleasantly, "Exactly what're you suggestin' there, Mandy?"

Ray's hand lands on his arm, an unspoken warning. Sonny shrugs it off.

Ellis doesn't bother even looking at Sonny. She keeps her gaze fixed on Hayes. "Eight days, Jason," she says softly.

Hayes shakes his head, jaw set. "No. Spenser wouldn't. No matter what they did to him-"

"And if they brought in a child and threatened to rape her to death in front of him if he didn't cooperate?" Mandy asks bluntly.

Jason goes pale. "_Jesus,_ Mandy."

She sighs, closes her eyes, opens them again. "I don't want to believe it any more than you do, okay? But it isn't so simple as 'he would never.' Everyone has a breaking point. _Everyone._ You know that."

He looks away, then back. Nods. "Point taken. But we're going anyway, and _you_ know _that."_

She returns his nod. "I do. But while you're en route, my people and I are going to analyze that conversation. If Clay made the call under duress, I believe he would have tried to come up with a way to communicate that. To warn us."

"Fair enough. You find something, let us know. Otherwise, we're going to get our boy."

At that, Mandy gives them all a hint of a smile. "I know. Stay safe. Bring him home."

"We'll do our best," Ray promises, clapping her on the shoulder briefly before moving on. Sonny can't bring himself to talk to her. He knows she feels bad about how they lost Spenser, has seen the circles under her eyes and the guilt shadowing her every move, but he can't forgive her yet. Especially not after what she just said.

Maybe once they have Clay back. Maybe then.

Much as they all want to hear their kid's voice, there wasn't time for them to listen to the recording of the conversation. Spenser made it clear that he's still in danger, likely being pursued into the mountains, so they need to get their asses in the air and to him ASAP. They can figure out how he's doing once they find him.

Mandy pinpointed the location of the call, but Clay will have moved by the time they get there. Which means they need Cerberus. Which means they need Brock.

He immediately made it clear that he's good to go. Trent made a face but then nodded reluctantly, so that's that: five members of Bravo, plus a hair missile, are going to bring their sixth man home.

The helo sets down in the flat, empty desert on the other side of the hills from the compound. The stretch of steep terrain in which Clay is hopefully safely hidden isn't big as far as acreage goes, but it's jagged as hell, littered with caves and outcrops, peaks and gullies.

Mandy wasn't able to get real-time ISR on such short notice. They'll have to find Clay, and avoid getting shot by his pursuers, the old-fashioned way.

Ellis doesn't pass along any warnings of impending ambush, so the team heads out. With the desert morning now well past, the sun is scorching, sending up ripples of heat waves that distort the horizon.

They move as quickly and quietly as possible, using the vantage points offered by higher terrain to check ahead, make sure they don't run into any surprises.

As expected, they're not the only ones out looking for Spenser. The tangos are moving in pairs, searching in what looks to be a fairly random pattern. If at all possible, Bravo needs to avoid contact. It would be easy enough to take out any of the individual pairs, or even a couple of them, but having the whole hornet's nest converge on their position would not be ideal.

They're hoping they'll run across Spenser's trail so Cerberus can lead them straight to him. For the first hour, that doesn't happen.

Hot and thirsty, they take a break on a sheltered slope to drink water and scout the terrain ahead. Brock is already starting to look a little pale, but when Trent checks in with him, he insists he's fine.

Peering through his scope, Ray reports quietly, "Got another tango to the..." He cuts off. "Hold on."

Sonny's heart pounds. "Is it him?"

Ray lets out a breath. "Local clothing. Can't make out the face. But he's alone and moving like he's hurt." He glances up at Jason. "Could be."

Sonny looks. The man on the other side of the scope has his back turned, headed away from them. He stumbles, goes down to a knee, pushes himself up and staggers on.

"That's him," Sonny says.

Jason gives him a searching look. "You sure?"

"That's Clay. We got to get to him." Sonny can't quite keep the desperation out of his voice, because they're _so close_ but they don't have him yet. He isn't safe yet.

Hayes hesitates. Sonny figures he's remembering Mandy's warning, wondering if they're being baited, but after a second, he nods. "Okay. Let's get our boy."

Leaving the high ground means losing sight of their target. Turns out that's fine, because the dog almost immediately picks up Clay's scent.

Cerberus takes off, claws scrabbling in the sand and loose gravel. The hope that grips Sonny's heart is almost painful, because if Cerb has the scent, then it really is Clay.

It's the yelling that lets them know they didn't get to Spenser first.

They round a ridge of broken stone to see Clay fighting like a man possessed against the two tangos who are trying to pin his arms to his sides.

He manages to pull a knife from somewhere, goes after one of them with it, only to drop it when his wrist gets twisted back. One of the men backhands him and he goes down hard.

An instant later, so does the tango, with a bullet in his head.

Cerberus takes a flying leap into the other one, whom Sonny casually shoots as soon as the dog is clear.

Ears ringing in the sudden silence, Sonny says, "Clay? You good?"

Nothing. Spenser doesn't move.

Brock catches hold of Cerb's harness and pulls him back. The dog whines, trembling with eagerness to check his boy, but obeys. Sonny, staying out of the way so Trent can work, knows the feeling.

Trent kicks the knife out of Spenser's reach, then crouches beside him. "Clay? Hey, buddy, you okay?"

He reaches out to check Clay's pulse, then scrambles back, barely getting his arm up in time to block the hands going for his throat. "Clay! Clay, it's me!"

"Spenser, _stand down!"_ Jason lunges forward to grab Clay by the shoulders, dragging him off the teammate he's attempting to strangle.

The commanding tone finally seems to get through. Spenser stops fighting and collapses back into Jason's grip, face pale beneath all the dirt and bruises, breathing raspy. "Jace?" He whispers.

"Yeah, kid, it's me. You're okay. We've got you. You're safe."

Clay wheezes, grabbing at Jason's sleeve with his right hand while tucking his left arm tight against his ribs. He squeezes his eyes shut. Tears cut trails through the dust caked on his cheeks.

Those tears hit Sonny like a punch to the solar plexus. Like any of them, Spenser doesn't like showing weakness. Sonny has never actually seen him cry before.

Cautiously, Trent kneels in front of his patient. "You with me now, Clay?"

Spenser nods, gasping in another rusty-hinge breath. "Yeah. Sorry."

"No worries. How bad are you hurt? Can you move?"

"'M okay. Yeah. With help."

Trent's face says he doesn't buy the 'okay' claim any more than Sonny does, but their first priority is getting the hell out of here. If Spenser is ambulatory and reasonably stable, that'll have to be good enough for now.

Sonny steps forward to help Clay to his feet and slide an arm around his shoulders, ignoring the stench of old sweat and blood. The kid is trembling violently and feels lighter than he should. It's wrong. He's only been gone just over a week.

A lot can happen in a week.

Soon as Jason turns loose of him, Clay transfers his grip to Sonny's arm, clinging tight. Up close, heat radiates off Spenser's skin, and his breathing sounds even worse; ragged with a deep, crackly rattle on each exhale. Over Clay's shoulder, Trent catches Sonny's gaze and shakes his head a little, face grim.

Sonny's heart sinks into his gut.

_Focus, dammit,_ he tells himself. _Sooner we get him out of here, the sooner he can be in a hospital gettin' his lungs fixed._

Sonny glances down at the hand clinging to his arm, which is when he realizes several of Clay's fingers are broken and he doesn't have any fingernails left, and also coincidentally when Sonny realizes he desperately needs to commit more violence. Right now.

Even more than that, though, he needs for Clay to be safe, so he stows the anger and hauls the kid away, toward the helo that's waiting for them on the other side of the hills.

Through a combination of skill and luck, they manage to avoid contact with any more tangos on the way out. About halfway there, Clay's eyes roll back in his head and he drops. Sonny carries him the rest of the way - while trying not to breathe through his nose, because the kid _reeks._

The brutal heat gets to Brock, too. He ends up leaning on Trent and needing help to climb up into the helo when they reach it.

They put Spenser on the floor, prop his feet up while Jason yells to the pilot to go. They're high off the ground by the time Trent leans down to lay a wet cloth across Clay's neck, and things immediately go to hell.

Spenser explodes into motion, kneeing Trent in the chest and then scrambling backward.

Toward the open door and the empty space beyond.

Sonny lunges, manages to snag a fistful of Clay's shirt, and hauls him forward, locking his arms around the kid's torso. Spenser fights, gasping for air, yelling something in French. His skin is hot enough to fry an egg.

He's not strong enough to break free, but he's gonna hurt himself more if he doesn't stop.

"Clay, calm down," Sonny says loudly. "Clay, it's me. It's Sonny. Come on, brother. _Please."_

He can't even bring himself to be ashamed of the way his voice breaks on that last word.

Spenser quiets and gradually stops struggling, though Sonny can't tell whether it's because he's realized he's safe or because he just doesn't have the energy to fight anymore.

Trent taps Sonny on the shoulder, gets him to shift to the side so that he can have better access to his patient, but Sonny doesn't turn loose of Clay until they land at the base and the medical team whisks the kid away.

Once it's over, once Clay is safe and receiving treatment and not there to hang onto anymore, Sonny looks down at his shaking hands and breathes, "Jesus _Christ."_

What the hell did they _do_ to him?


	8. Chapter 8

They have to wait what feels like forever to receive an update on Spenser.

In the meantime, Brock gets taken off, against his will, to be admitted and given IV fluids. With the blood loss just a few days behind him, the heat and dehydration hit him hard. He makes the others promise to update him as soon as they know anything more about Clay.

For a while, there's silence, every man lost in his own thoughts. Then Sonny asks quietly, "What if we didn't get to him in time?"

Trent, looking bone-deep tired, lifts his head from where he'd been resting it on his folded hands. "His vitals were strong. Once they get his temperature down, get some fluids and antibiotics into him, I think he'll be okay."

"I'm not just talkin' about that," Sonny says. His voice is still shaky.

Jason, without looking up from the paperclip he's fiddling with, says, "Don't sell him short, Sonny. He's a tough kid. He'll bounce back."

Sonny stares. "Did y'all miss the part where he like to have jumped out of a goddamn helicopter?"

Trent stiffens, sitting up straight so fast that Sonny flinches a little. "Don't say it like that. Don't make it sound like … like he was _trying_ to. He was startled, and he had a fever high enough to addle somebody who _hadn't_ just survived eight days of torture." His voice is uncharacteristically sharp.

Sonny wilts, looking down at his hands. "Yeah. Yeah, sorry. You're right. I didn't mean to … I didn't mean it like that."

Clay wouldn't have done it on purpose. He knows that. Not after how hard the kid fought to stay alive, to make sure his brothers could find him and bring him home.

It's just that it scared the hell out of Sonny, because they got Spenser back, against all odds, and then they almost lost him anyway.

It's just that he can't stop thinking about those eight days, and what happened during them to leave Clay so hurt and so damn terrified of anyone touching him, and how they _weren't there._

How long did it take him to figure out his team wasn't coming for him? That his only chance at survival was to get himself out?

Is he ever gonna be able to forgive them for that?

When the doctor finally comes out, they all bolt to their feet at the same time. Jason asks, "How is he?"

The doctor gives them a reassuring smile. "His temperature is already coming down. He's got pneumonia in his left lung, but he's stable enough that we should be able to treat that here."

"And?" Jason prompts.

"Dehydration. Three broken ribs, which probably contributed to the pneumonia. Sprained ankle that's started to heal. Stable nightstick fracture of the left ulna. Concussion. Broken fingers and toes. Lots of superficial injuries: bruises, cuts, burns."

_Missing fingernails, _Sonny thinks, and again wants to murder someone.

"Nothing … else?" Jason asks uncomfortably, his gaze skittering away to the wall behind the doctor's head.

The doctor looks confused for a second before working out what Hayes is awkwardly trying to ask. "Ah. No. No signs of sexual assault."

Sonny's knees go weak with relief, because, yeah, he wondered. Hard not to with how violently Clay reacted to being touched. The situation is bad enough already; at least it looks like there's one level of 'bad' they won't have to be dealing with.

Jason's gaze fixes on the doctor's face again. "Bottom line?"

He hesitates briefly. "Barring unforeseen complications, all his physical injuries should heal. He'll be out of commission for a while, though. Probably 10 weeks minimum."

Sonny looks at Ray, who looks at Jason, who looks at Trent. The doctor has pity on them and answers the question they're trying to figure out how to ask. "It's too early to make a judgment on his mental state. Yes, he was confused and combative, and we did have to sedate him, but he's also very ill right now. Give him time."

After promising that they can see Clay as soon as he gets settled into a room, the doctor leaves.

Sonny turns to Trent. "What kind of fracture did he say now?"

Trent clears his throat. "Nightstick fracture. It's, uh, a defensive injury." He demonstrates by raising his arm, shielding his head with it, letting them fill in the rest.

It's not like they didn't already know Clay got the shit beat out of him. His busted-up face was proof enough of that. Somehow the broken arm, and the way it got broken, makes Sonny want to yell and throw things anyway.

Trent goes to check up on Brock and give him the news. Jason and Sonny wait until a nurse comes to get them and take them to Spenser.

The kid looks somewhat better. They've cleaned him up, bandaged the worst of his cuts and burns, splinted his fingers, put a cast on his arm. His color is a little improved now that the fever is coming down, and the pain lines in his face have smoothed out thanks to the good meds. He's still busted all to hell, his battered face half hidden by an oxygen mask, but Sonny can look at him now and bring himself to believe that he'll heal. Physically, anyway.

Honestly, much as this sucks, it's something close to a miracle that they got him back with all his important bits. Not crippled or maimed; nothing shattered so bad it won't mend.

Between the pain meds and the sheer exhaustion, Spenser is out cold for a good 18 hours. Once they're done being debriefed, the other members of Bravo Team, minus Brock who is still on an IV, switch off staying with Clay. Sonny takes a shift in the wee hours of the morning, and he can't resist very gently patting Clay's good arm, just to see how he'll react.

Spenser doesn't wake up, but his body tenses and his arm shifts away minutely. Sonny pulls back and doesn't try again.

It breaks his heart a little. He doesn't know how to help.

Naturally, Clay announces he's awake by damn near breaking a nurse's wrist.

When it happens, Jason is inside the room, and Sonny is out in the hallway talking to Trent about how Brock is doing. There's a sudden explosion of yelling. By the time Sonny makes it inside, Jason has pinned Spenser's shoulders to the bed and the nurse has retreated, arm held to her chest.

"Clay, stop it," Hayes orders sharply. "Stand down."

Spenser stops struggling, manages to focus on Jason. His gaze flicks around the room and settles on the nurse, and he winces, staring at her with sad hound-dog eyes.

"Shit," he mumbles, barely audible behind the mask. "Sorry."

With the situation under control, the nurse moves back to the bedside, giving him a sunny smile. "Don't be. I should know better than to startle a sleeping frogman. How you feeling?"

Still looking guiltily at her wrist, he tries to answer, but instead starts into a round of coughing that has him gasping behind the mask and clutching at his chest, tears leaking from the corners of his tightly shut eyes.

Sonny winces. Broken ribs hurt like absolute hell at the best of times, so he can't imagine what this must feel like. "Can't you do something for the coughing?" He asks the nurse plaintively.

She makes a sympathetic face, but shakes her head. "He needs to cough it up, so a suppressant isn't a good idea. I can give him something more for the pain, though."

She injects something into Clay's IV that does seem to help, but leaves him groggy and out of it. Before she leaves the room, Trent quickly checks her wrist, concluding that it's just bruised. Spenser having one arm in a cast, and half his fingers splinted, probably saved her from being hurt a lot worse.

After a couple more incidents that make it clear that Spenser attempting to straight-up murder people who startle him is not a problem that's going away anytime soon, the medical staff bring up the possibility of putting him in soft restraints.

"You know, I don't reckon y'all ought to do that," Sonny tells them politely.

Jason explains that he just doesn't really love the idea of them strapping down his guy who just spent eight hellish days in captivity, and promises that Clay's team will stick around to defuse things and make sure no nurses end up dead. Hayes wins the argument, which feels like a hollow victory in the face of Clay's continued disorientation.

Trent keeps reminding them that Spenser is still sick, that things will be better once the kid is clearer-headed, but he kinda sounds like he's trying to convince himself too.

After a couple days, the same doctor who gave them the initial report on Clay shows up to talk to the team again. He updates them first on Spenser's physical health, saying that the pneumonia is hanging on but seems to be gradually improving. He pauses, then adds, "As I'm sure you've all noticed, he's exhibiting some pretty intense hypervigilance right now. That might ease up with time as his health improves and his brain comes to understand that he's safe now, but it also might not."

Jason exhales. "PTSD?"

"Can't be diagnosed this soon, but given what he's been through, it's a possibility. I'd suggest having him see a therapist once he's healthy and coherent enough." When Jason starts to open his mouth, the doctor raises his hand. "I know, I know, you team guys aren't big on therapy, but I'm not just talking about touchy-feely conversations here. There are treatments that can help the brain work through trauma and store the memories properly so they don't keep popping up where they don't belong. Just think about it, okay?"

After a tense moment, Jason grudgingly nods.

Sonny is usually leery of the idea of therapy, but at this point he's willing to try just about anything that might help. Hell, he's half a mind to call up Kairos and see if he'll burn some incense or arrange crystals or some shit like that.

He just wants Clay to get better. Back to being more like himself, not this hollow-eyed ghost who ricochets between violent panic and confused contrition.

That's not too much to hope for, is it?


	9. Chapter 9

Clay wakes up in a hospital bed.

He feels … okay, mostly. Better than expected. There are a lot of aches, but they're muted, in a cottony sort of way that probably means pain meds. He's a little short of breath and there's an oxygen mask over his face, but the spearpoint agony he remembers in his lung is more or less gone.

When he shifts experimentally, Trent says softly from somewhere to his right, "Hey, Clay. You awake?"

He manages to turn his head, nod. Trent gives him a tired smile. "Welcome back. I'm gonna get Jason real quick, okay?"

Clay isn't sure why Trent would need to get Jason, but he's having trouble putting a lot of things together. He knows he was captured and it sucked, and he remembers having a fever and his chest hurting a lot, but he's not quite certain how he got from there to here.

Trent comes back in a minute later, followed by Jason, who says, "Hey." His voice is uncharacteristically soft, and when he moves, it's slowly, keeping his hands visible. "Is it okay if I sit down here?"

Clay blinks a few times and stares in fuzzy confusion for long enough that Hayes starts to look worried.

Clay's team leader is asking _him_ for permission to _sit?_

When it becomes clear that Jason really is going to wait for a response, Clay attempts a 'yeah' that disappears into an indistinct mumble behind the oxygen mask. Finally he just nods, and Jason sits, still moving slowly and deliberately.

Clay's heart rate goes up a little. Is Jason hurt? He doesn't remember him being hurt, but granted, he's pretty sure there's a lot he's not remembering. What about the rest of the team? Sonny, Brock, Ray?

Clay tries to reach up to take off the oxygen mask, only to pull up when he realizes he can't really move some of his fingers. When he glances down, he sees splints; bandages where fingernails should be.

Oh. Yeah. That's gonna suck for a while.

He decides he can still get the oxygen mask off, so he reaches up again. Jason starts to lean forward to stop him, only to freeze in place with a vaguely guilty expression.

Okay, _something_ is going on, and Clay needs to know what the hell it is. He clumsily removes the mask, coughs a wet cough that cuts through his chest like a saw blade - ah, _there's_ the pain he remembered - and then whispers, "You okay?"

Hayes's eyebrows shoot up. "Am _I_ okay?"

"Yeah." Clay coughs again. "Acting … weird."

Jason exchanges a glance with Trent. "Oh. Yeah, I'm fine."

Clay doesn't really believe him, but doesn't have the breath to argue. "Team?" He croaks.

"They're all okay. Brock got winged a little while back, but he's gonna be fine. No harm to anybody else."

Clay nods. He tries to lift the oxygen mask back to his face, but it slips from his splinted fingers.

Hayes leans forward, very carefully, and watches Clay's expression while gently securing the mask back in place. That's when the odd behavior finally begins to make sense, and Clay's cheeks start to burn as though his fever has come back.

His hardass team leader is _trying not to scare him._

Something must have happened after they found him. Whatever it was, he's pretty sure it was embarrassing; judging by the way Jason is acting, probably embarrassing to a degree that Clay is never going to live down.

He decides to avoid the whole situation by going back to sleep. When he wakes up again, an unknown time later, it's Sonny in the room with him.

Seeing that Clay's eyes are open, the Texan goes so still that even his toothpick-gnawing ceases. "Hey, Blondie," he drawls softly. "You with me?"

Clay coughs, pressing his casted arm against his ribs for support. "Yeah," he mumbles, noticing then that the oxygen mask has been replaced by a nasal cannula, which must indicate at least some improvement.

Sonny's grin lights up his whole face. He starts to say something, but is interrupted when the door opens and a nurse comes in, carrying a syringe. She looks immediately at Sonny, who gets to his feet and nods slightly, and then she turns to smile at Clay. She's middle-aged, with graying hair and kind eyes.

Everything goes fine until she gets close, and Clay notices the way the light glints off the needle on the syringe, and it's like a ratchet strap tightens down around his chest. He breathes through his nose, consciously trying to force himself to relax.

It's stupid. She's not gonna hurt him. He _knows_ that.

The nurse asks him a question. Running on autopilot, all his focus taken up by trying to tamp down the sudden, irrational anxiety, Clay answers her in French.

The reaction is instantaneous. The nurse takes a quick step back at exactly the same time Sonny moves forward to sweep her behind him. It's a fluid, practiced motion, like the steps to a dance Clay doesn't know.

He looks at the nurse. At the syringe. Beyond it, to the fading bruising on her wrist.

Oh, _goddammit._

"I do that?" Clay asks, managing English this time.

Some of the tension bleeds from Sonny's stance. His eyes also go shifty, which means yes. "You were real out of it," he says. "Didn't know where you were."

Clay ignores him, scrunching down in the bed and resolutely closing his eyes.

"Hey, Clay," the nurse says softly. "Is it okay if I give you your antibiotics real quick?"

Without opening his eyes, he nods, then realizes that might not be enough to reassure her and says clearly in English, "Yes."

As soon as he feels her move into his space, the tension ratchets back up again. Jesus, what is _wrong_ with him?

"You shouldn't feel bad about the wrist," the nurse says conversationally. "My fault. I knew better than to startle you like that. Also, I've hurt myself worse emptying bedpans."

He cracks his eyes open to give her a skeptical look.

She grins, casting smile lines around her eyes. "Dropped one of the stainless steel ones on my toe one time. Hurt like a motherfucker. No offense, but this little bruise just doesn't compare."

Clay makes a valiant attempt to hang onto the nice pity party he just got done scheduling for himself, but despite his best efforts, her briskly cheerful tone does kind of make him feel better.

After she leaves, and after Sonny gives him a cup of water that vastly improves the state of his throat, Clay thinks through things, mulls over the way his injuries don't hurt as much as expected, and finally asks a question that probably should have occurred to him before. "How long have I been here?"

Sonny, who has returned to his seat, shifts a little. "Ah, almost five days."

Clay blinks. "Five days?"

"Yeah. You don't remember any of it?"

He shakes his head.

"What's the last thing you _do_ remember?"

That's a surprisingly hard question to answer. There are a lot of scattered fragments, none of them especially pleasant, and fitting them into any kind of chronological order feels like putting together a puzzle with half the pieces missing. He finally guesses, "Uh, I think being in the mountains? It was hot. My chest hurt."

"Yeah, it was hotter than hell, and you also had a fever that like to have fried your brain. Trent said-"

A flash of memory jolts to the surface. Clay interrupts, "Wait. Shit. Did I go after Trent?"

Sonny clears his throat. "Ah. Yeah, you kind of maybe tried to strangle him a little." At the look on Clay's face, he quickly adds, "You didn't hurt him none. Jason got you off him before you could."

Still, though, it's the principle of the thing. Clay definitely owes Trent an apology. And a bottle of whiskey. The good stuff.

Then Sonny continues, "Well, you did knock the wind out of him when you kicked him in the chest, but-"

"Wait, I kicked him in the chest?"

"Yeah. That was the second time."

_Two_ bottles of whiskey. At least.

Honestly, from the way everyone has been acting around him, he probably owes their respective favorite drinks to the rest of his team too.

Clay doesn't realize that he and Sonny have been performing a silent guilt duet until Sonny says morosely, while staring down at his hands, "I'm sorry."

There's a depth of emotion in his teammate's voice that catches Clay off guard. All he can think to say is, "Why?"

That seems to make Sonny feel even worse. He curls forward a little, shoulders hunched, and takes an unsteady breath. "Clay, those bastards had you for _eight days."_

Huh. So his guess of a week had been surprisingly accurate.

"Eight days. And we weren't there." Sonny's voice breaks. "And I'm sorry for that."

"Sonny, look, it's…" He trails off, not sure what to say.

It wasn't like there was a specific moment or even a particular day when he realized they weren't gonna show up and rescue him. It was gradual, and even after it sank in, he never let go of the simple bedrock truth that he believed in above all else: If Bravo could come for him, they would.

The fact that they didn't meant that they _couldn't._ It was the only possible explanation. From there, it was logical to assume that they couldn't find him, which meant he had to make sure they could. That was how he would survive. The only way.

He would call for them, and they would be there.

That certainty is the only reason he's not dead. He's busted up and an absolute mess in about a dozen different ways, but he's _alive_ because he knew they would come if he called.

Now he just needs to figure out a way to make them understand that … preferably without admitting just how shamefully close he came to giving up.

* * *

Coming up in chapter 10: Cerberus the unofficial therapy dog!


	10. Chapter 10

Clay convinces himself that everything will be fine once he gets to go home.

It is true that things get better there, to some extent. The familiar surroundings are soothing. It's nice to not have to worry about inadvertently attacking nurses while half-asleep. He doesn't miss the harsh lighting, the smell of illness and disinfectant.

But somewhere deep down, he let himself believe he'd go home and immediately return to being the same guy who left for the mission to rescue Ashli Mayers, and that's definitely not how it ends up playing out.

For one thing, he has a hell of a time sleeping, and being back in his own bed doesn't help as much as he hoped it would. He struggles to relax enough to drift off, and when he _does_ sleep, he has nightmares. Mostly, he dreams he's back there, back at the mercy of the bastard brigade, except that it's worse because he's not the only captive.

Sonny is there too. Or Trent. Or Brock. The whole team.

His grandparents. Davis. Mandy. Emma and Mikey. Naima. Hell, even Stella shows up at one point.

What happened to him was bad. He can admit that, at least to himself. Being forced instead to watch it happen to everyone he cares about? Yeah, that's worse. A lot worse.

Clay doesn't wake up from the nightmares the way people do on TV. He doesn't jolt straight up, gasping. That might be better than what actually happens, which is that he wakes up absolutely terrified and completely unable to move. He feels like he's trapped, locked inside his own body, powerless to fight back against … something. He doesn't even know what.

When that finally subsides, when he can move enough to roll himself over, he always gets hit with a powerful jolt of adrenaline that leaves his hands shaking, leaves him unable to even consider going back to bed for a long time afterward.

His team picks up pretty quickly on the whole 'not sleeping' situation. It would be hard not to, given that they're kind of smothering him a little bit.

Jason has been the most reasonable and hands-off about the whole thing. Clay is pretty sure the others have each received at least one _Spenser is a grown-ass adult, stop hovering_ speech from Hayes, which Clay appreciates, but which can only go so far given that he actually _does_ still need some help.

He's healing, but it turns out that starving for eight days and then getting pneumonia leaves you pretty weak. Between that and the broken arm and fingers, Clay is not really up to doing a lot of basic everyday stuff like preparing food or washing dishes. Hell, he struggles opening pill bottles.

As a result, he hasn't yet actually been left alone in his apartment. The guys take turns staying with him, Sonny and Brock the most. He tries, not always successfully, to be patient with their hovering. A few times when he gets really frustrated, he's tempted to start speaking French at them just to freak them out, but resists the urge because that would be cruel.

He's still not exactly clear on everything that went down when they found him and during the first five days afterward, but whatever it was, it obviously left his team pretty shaken.

Not talking about it is part of every Navy SEAL's favorite coping strategy, avoidance, which they all cling to for a while. Clay doesn't really discuss what happened to him. His teammates attempt to hide the guilt complexes they obviously still have despite his attempts to convince them it wasn't their fault.

It's Sonny, of all people, who eventually convinces Clay to start talking.

The morning after a particularly bad night, when Clay is so tired that he feels like his head is going to float off his body, Sonny drops into the chair across from him and states, "You ain't been sleepin'."

Clay looks at the floor. "Yeah, not really," he says after a while.

"Wanna talk about it?" Sonny sounds a little awkward, as he always does when discussing anything feelings-adjacent, but also utterly sincere.

Clay opens his mouth to say 'not really,' but what comes out instead is, "There was this one big dude. I never caught his name, so I just thought of him as Fuckface."

Sonny laughs a little, a startled-sounding snicker. The return smile it draws from Clay feels good, even though it tugs at healing cuts on his face.

"Anyway," he continues, "he'd come into the room where they were keeping me, while I was asleep or unconscious or whatever."

Sonny has gone very still, listening.

Clay runs his fingertips over the grooves on the lid of the pill bottle in front of him. "The rest of the time there was kind of a routine to it, you know? They'd come and get me, drag me out to the room where the fun happened, and I'd zone out by the time they got me there. But this … I didn't get time to prepare for it. I'd just wake up and he'd be there. And man, he hated me a _lot."_

Sonny leans forward a little. His calm, direct gaze gives Clay the courage to continue.

"I guess I learned that being asleep was dangerous, and waking up was probably not gonna be fun. Especially if there was somebody else around when I did."

Sonny sighs. "Jesus, Clay. That sucks." There's no pity in his voice; he's just stating a fact. Clay loves him a little for that.

"Yeah," he agrees. "On the flip side, it was also probably the only reason I made it out. He left the door unlocked behind him, and I took his knife away and cut his goddamn throat with it."

"You know," Sonny drawls, "I was just thinkin' how much I needed to meet that ol' boy. Glad to hear you already took care of it."

It's the first time Clay has even so much as described his escape to one of his teammates. He was debriefed, of course; his superiors needed to know everything that happened, everything he might have said, every piece of information he might have given up. _I have no idea what all I said, but it was all in French and none of them spoke French_ was obviously not the answer they were looking for, but they did eventually seem to accept that it was the only one he had.

Exhausted to near delirium, Clay manages to nap for a while that afternoon. He wakes to learn that the healthy members of Bravo have been spun up to join Alpha for a mission. As a result, Sonny has been replaced by Brock, whose arm is still healing.

Brock brings Cerberus, which means, shitty night aside, the day automatically isn't a total loss.

Clay has always enjoyed the company of Bravo's resident hair missile. That feeling is amplified now. Having Cerb in his space doesn't freak him out the way people tend to, and there's no pressure to act okay. With the dog, he can just _be._

That night, after the inevitable nightmare-panic cycle happens, Clay hears a soft thump in the living room, the ticking of claws on flooring, and then a gentle whine at his bedroom door.

As soon as Clay opens up, Cerberus trots cheerfully inside, hops up on the bed, and lies down on his belly. He stares up with hopeful puppy eyes, tail thumping gently.

Out in the living room, Brock is, by all appearances, sound asleep on the couch. Clay sighs and closes the door.

It takes a while to get situated. Brock always makes it look so easy, even in small spaces, but Clay isn't accustomed to sharing sleeping quarters with a large dog - especially not while injured. He finally manages to find a reasonably comfortable position and lies still, staring at the ceiling, running his fingers through the dog's soft fur.

His heartbeat slows. Eventually, he falls asleep.

When he wakes, groggy and sweaty, there's sunlight spilling across his face, golden against his closed eyelids. His eyes feel like they're glued shut. Cerberus is sprawled across his shoulder and upper chest, muzzle nestled up under his chin. Clay is pretty sure there's dog hair in his mouth.

It's the best he's slept in ages.

Clay scratches behind Cerb's ear, listens as the lazy tail-thumping begins, and smiles without opening his eyes.

It's not a miracle, not a cure, but it is a start.

He goes to therapy. It's miserable, and he hates it, and it doesn't help - until, slowly, it does.

He talks, in fits and starts. He tells Ray about the kid he couldn't bring himself to kill; tells Jason about learning he was going to be sold, about knowing what that meant.

Cerberus stays with him off and on, sometimes even when Brock doesn't. Before going to sleep over at his girlfriend's place, Brock will drop Cerb off, claiming Clay is doing him a favor by keeping the dog from interrupting at, ah, inconvenient moments.

Clay still has nightmares sometimes, but the dog helps, and Clay learns coping mechanisms to ease the resulting panic even when Cerberus isn't there.

He has good days. He has bad days. Gradually, more and more, the good ones outnumber the bad.

One morning he wakes up, sees bright blue sky through the window, and realizes he slept straight through the night and didn't dream at all.

* * *

Up next, in the epilogue: After Clay rejoins Bravo, a mission goes sideways. Everybody tries to stay calm. (Some more successfully than others.)


	11. Chapter 11

Clay stares up at the ceiling of the C-17. He isn't sure what woke him until he hears Sonny say softly, "Hey, Goldilocks. It's me."

Without looking over at the Texan, Clay smiles a little. It's been months since the last time he woke up panicked and confused about where he was and who was near him. His teammates, who learned during his recovery to always announce themselves if they were nearby when he woke up, have gradually stopped doing so as they've figured out that he no longer needs it.

All except Sonny. He still does it, every time. Clay doesn't have the heart to tell him it's not necessary.

"Hey." Clay's voice is rusty from sleep. "We landing soon?"

"Yep," Sonny drawls. "Just about time to go retrieve the nerds' magic computer."

In the aftermath of a chaotic evacuation, U.S. intelligence agents realized they'd accidentally left behind a laptop containing information that could be catastrophic in the wrong hands. Based on ISR data, Mandy believes the abandoned outpost is still secure for the moment, but that won't last long. Bravo needs to get there ASAP. They'll be coming in from the north, sneaking and/or fighting their way through the smallest possible section of enemy-occupied territory.

Once they're on the ground, they make good progress, with HAVOC using live ISR to help them avoid the heaviest concentrations of enemy fighters. A couple blocks from the target location, they reach an area that's got poor visibility and an uncomfortable number of tangos lurking in the shadows. Jason sends his snipers to provide overwatch, one to each side of the street.

The first time Hayes sent Clay off on his own, it made the entire team a little jumpy - even Jason, for all that he tried to hide it. They pushed through, because that's what they do, and now it's business as usual. Clay is a damn good sniper. History or no history, his team needs to be able to take advantage of that.

It was inevitable that trouble would eventually crop up again. Today just happens to be the day.

Once the area is cleared, Mandy reports that things should be calmer the rest of the way, so Jason calls his snipers down to rejoin the rest of the team.

Clay packs it up, makes it nearly halfway down the stairs, then freezes in place and silently backtracks up into the room he just left.

"Bravo One, this is Bravo Six," he breathes into the radio. "Got a situation. Building I'm in is no longer clear."

There's just the briefest of pauses before Hayes answers. "_Copy, Bravo Six. Can you get out?"_

"Negative. Too many. All downstairs for now."

Jason starts to respond, but before he can, Mandy cuts in to report that a group of tangos is rapidly approaching the target building from the south. Bravo needs to secure the laptop. Now.

Clay closes his eyes. He practices sniper breathing. He grounds himself, the way his therapist taught him. Then he says softly, "Go. I'll be fine."

Another brief hesitation before Jason asks, "_You sure?"_

"I'm good, boss. Only way up is the stairs, and that's a bottleneck. If they come at me, I'll handle it."

"_Roger that, Bravo Six,"_ Hayes says, and then he adds, "_We'll be back for you in 20, 30 mikes. Hold tight."_

"Copy."

Breathe in. Breathe out. Clay sits down, gun at the ready, and prepares to go out in a blaze of glory if it comes to that.

* * *

Sonny says, "Jace, we-"

Jason holds up his hand. "No."

"But I can-"

"Sonny. _No._ If Mandy's right, we're about to kick a hornet's nest, and I need all my shooters." Hayes finally actually looks at him. "Clay's got it. He'll be fine. We'll go back for him."

Sonny looks down, avoiding Jason's gaze. His mouth feels drier than Pecos dirt. He's not quite sure when or how the damn kid got this far under his skin, but it's over and done with now.

"Sonny." Jason reaches out, squeezes his arm until he looks back up. "Spenser can handle himself. We can trust him to do that. If we couldn't, if worrying about him kept us from doing our job, he wouldn't belong here. Right?"

Sonny draws a slow breath, lets it out just as slow. "Right."

"You got that?"

"I got it, boss."

You don't become a tier one operator without being good at compartmentalizing, so Sonny shoves everything away. He pretends this is just another of the missions they went on without Spenser before he was cleared for duty. Clay isn't here, so there's no reason to worry about him at all.

Things go pretty okay until they reach the target building. Their little delay cost them just enough time that they end up making it there only seconds before that group of tangos HAVOC warned them about, which means they barely get inside before all hell breaks loose.

The good part is that they're inside the building and the tangos are still outside. The bad part is that they're outnumbered and the enemy has some serious firepower. It takes some doing to hold them off while also simultaneously searching for the spooks' goddamn computer.

In the end, they do manage to find the stupid magic laptop and head for the exit without getting shot.

Conveniently, that's right about the time the DShK arrives.

Mandy gives them just enough warning that they hit the deck in time to avoid getting chewed up into piles of steaming body parts.

Sonny doesn't think about how they promised _twenty minutes,_ and how this is looking to take significantly longer than that. He does not. He thinks about surviving, here, right now, because that's what he can control.

They wait for the DShK to be reloaded, except then it turns out the pause in firing was a goddamn bluff, and it's only uncannily good instincts that prevent Trent from getting cut in half when he heads out to throw a frag. He ends up pinned down and separated from the rest of the team - but he holds his own, and when the DShK finally actually _does_ need to reload, he's in position to blow it to hell.

After that, it's just a matter of taking out the remaining fighters and making their way back to Bravo Six. Brock takes a bullet to the body armor, but it doesn't go through and he gets right back up and swears he's fine. He's breathless but steady on his feet, so Trent gives him a sharp nod and they get moving.

Once they reach the building where they left Spenser, Cerberus goes in first and the rest of Bravo follows. It doesn't take long to eliminate the six tangos who stood between Clay and escape. Of Spenser himself there is no sign, which hopefully indicates that he's still safely hidden upstairs.

In the sudden, ringing silence that follows the efficient shooting, Sonny starts to head for the stairs. Before he can make it more than a few steps in that direction, Clay pokes his head around the corner and grins his cockiest grin.

"Glad y'all could drop by," he drawls. "Took long enough. Y'all are getting slow in your old age."

If the kid is turning his 'insolent little shit' dial up to 11, then this little adventure definitely shook him up some.

Sonny reaches him first, takes him by the shoulders, looks into his eyes. "You good?"

Clay nods, holding Sonny's gaze. He lets the smirk drop, leaving his expression clear and calm. "I'm good. You?"

Sonny smiles. "'Course I am," he says, and means it. "Let's go home."

He bumps Clay's shoulder with his own, and together they walk out into the sunlight with their brothers beside them.

* * *

That's all, folks! Thanks for reading.

It turns out I need y'alls advice. I have two ideas for upcoming stories, and can't decide which I should write first, so I'm going to ask y'all if you have a preference which you'd like to read first.

Option 1 is titled "Far Removed." Summary: "With most of Bravo off on a boring escort mission, Mandy brings one member of the team along for a routine meeting with an asset. An unexpected coup soon leaves both groups fighting to stay alive." Would feature hurt everyone, badasses protecting each other, and Mandy the Good Idea Fairy attempting to navigate an extremely dangerous survival situation.

Option 2 is titled "Bring You Home." Summary: "On Clay's third mission back with Bravo, a fall from a bridge into a river leaves him and Ray injured and alone. While Clay struggles to keep himself and his brother alive, the rest of Bravo desperately tries to figure out how to rescue them from forbidden territory." Would be set post-season 2 and deal with the fallout from Clay's IED injuries.

Let me know which you prefer. Or if you don't have a preference, that's fine too. :)


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